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I spent most of the first week in July at the 39th Montreal Jazz Festival, which ran from June 28 through July 7. It's a massive, joyous undertaking, with concerts in over 11 indoor venues and outdoor events attended by happy throngs of listeners and revelers, who this year paraded in the heat in the closed-off section which for that week and a half the city dedicated to music. On my first night in Montreal, I heard the National Jazz Orchestra led by Christine Jensen play the music of Carla Bley. It was supposed to be led by the 80-year-old Bley herself, but she was too ill to attend. Her disappointing absence proved to be an opportunity for some. When I have heard Carla Bley conduct a large band, she rarely took a piano solo: The music is in the orchestra. In Montreal, the orchestra, which has played together since 2012, of course played the lion's share of the arrangements of tunes such as On the Stage in Cages (from Big Band Theory) and Greasy Gravy and Awful Coffee (from Bley's Appearing Nightly). But the concert also featured a succession of piano soloists, including Helen Sung, who appeared with trumpeter Ingrid Jensen in Awful Coffee. The balance was shifted, though as a result we heard a succession of (mostly) female pianists emerge from the crowd.
The Montreal concert began with a lovely piano solo that quotes the standard My Foolish Heart as an introduction to Bley's Appearing Nightly at the Black Orchid. It's as if someone like Bill Evans were appearing at the Black Orchid. Bley plays the solo on the record: A young woman named Gentiane MG played it even more lyrically in Montreal. The introduction, sweet as it is, yields to long lines by the guitar over threatening mutterings by the band. Among the Bley compositions that were played that night, Greasy Gravy isn't the funk tune we might expect from the title. It's a whimsical little melody that Bley's band recorded, and the National Band performed confidently. It begins with a perhaps carefully written but also delightfully wacky sloppiness, reminding us that Bley is one of the great humorists of jazz. That's the first section, but then an alto saxophone takes over...